Why We Needed James, and Why James Needs The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Like all posted-a-black-square-and-then-deleted-it Whites, I read Percival Everrett’s James earlier this year. It was mostly good. Sometimes great. Sometimes puzzling. But, most often, good. Yet, I can’t get the damn thing out of my head. I’ve never thought about a book I bequeathed “pretty good” upon, for this long. It seems like every day I’m either praising the book or grousing about it. Frankly, I’m sorry for my friends who, at this point, could probably walk you through my feelings on the book about as well as I can. Then--while I was reading Ron Chernow’s newest biography: Mark Twain--James went and won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

So, I accepted defeat and reread The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for the first time since childhood. It was mostly good. Sometimes great. Sometimes puzzling. But, most often, good.

I found Huckleberry Finn’s central theme more pertinent to my life, and therefore connected with the book on a deeper level.

So, I drafted an article about why James fails where Huckleberry Finn succeeds.

But that didn’t quite capture my feelings.

There wasn’t room in that essay for how engaging the scenes in James are when Huck isn’t anywhere to be found. Or how meandering the chapters of Huckleberry Finn are when Jim is absent. Nowhere to compare the books’ genre-fueled endings. In short, nowhere to get all of my feelings out about either book in one go.

So, I texted a friend, the friend who has probably heard the most about my James feelings (and to him I say: sorry, I love you.) He told me to just write out my conflicted feelings about both books. He said that he is constantly on the look out for analyses that acknowledge that the author does not have definitive answers and that have room for internal conflict.

Here you go.

For those who are unfamiliar with the plot of Huckleberry Finn (sorry you missed the 7th grade, hope you caught up) or how it relates to James (sorry you missed #BookTok 2024, you don’t really need to get caught up):

• There was this book called The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. It was a mostly-fictional story about Mark Twain’s childhood in Hannibal, Missouri before the Civil War. It’s decidedly a children's book, but one of those ones that grown-ups can get a lot out of and that kids don’t like anymore now that TV exists. Or, maybe, they didn’t even like it back when the outside existed. Perhaps it's mostly for kids like me, who liked the concept of adventure, but from the safety of the basement couch. (This is the entire demographic of Substack, you unemployed librarians.)

• The clear standout in that book is the side character Huckleberry Finn. He seems to be an amalgamation of a few children from Twain’s childhood that took on a life of his own. He smokes, he swears, he traffics in dead cats, he’s never gone to school, he’s never worn shoes of his own accord. The kid is cool as hell.

• Twain’s idyllic remembrance of his childhood as portrayed in Tom Sawyer soured with Twain’s changing views on slavery and The South. Therefore, Tom Sawyer no longer felt like a final statement from Twain.

• Thus, Huckleberry Finn. In this pseudo-sequel to Tom Sawyer the audience is swept away down the Mississippi River on a raft with Huckleberry Finn and the runaway slave Jim.

• The book explores the American South through Twain’s updated worldview. It’s a place of beauty, trickery, hucksters, ne’er-do-wells, backwards morals, the evils of slavery, and somehow, some good-hearted people. Huck’s only constant companion through it all is Jim, who shows Huck, the reader, and Mark Twain, how to see a different world.

• One Hundred and Forty years later, Percival Everett (author of the novel Erasure which became the film American Fiction in 2023) took up the pen and rewrote the story from Jim--James’s--point of view. No longer a caricature, James is a character with enormous internality, narrating his feelings throughout the familiar portions of the plot of Huckleberry Finn, and filling us in on what he was up to in the portions of the story where he dips out of Huck’s view.

Voice

Everett and Twain, though separated by just about every demographic imaginable, are both authors primarily concerned with voice. For Twain, the quest for voice was totally tied up in the creation of verasimilitude. Every accent, rhythm, and bit of slang would be exactly as Twain had observed it, or, often enough, lived it. This was essential, in his view, to conjure the world of his novels. Everett’s quest for voice couldn’t be further from Twain’s approach. Concerned with the implications of “Black voice,” Everett challenges the kinds of stereotypes present in Twain’s work. Everett, and his work, tells the reader, “No, we don’t all talk like that.”

Both authors use the novel as a means of making you understand how a person’s language informs your perception of them. They both succeed, and they both fall short.

Twain succeeds in placing you within The South of his childhood, and to a Utah-born New York resident in 2025, it’s a foreign country. The dialects are thick. The words garbled. The rhythms complex. It’s a difficult book to read quickly. But it’s full of characters that are hard to forget. The King does not speak like The Duke. Huck does not speak like Tom. Jim may or may not speak like anyone else in the book, and that’s where the complication lies.

The entire thrust of James is that Mark Twain failed to capture Jim’s voice. I genuinely cannot decide if I agree or disagree. I cannot decide if he is caricature or character. I am aware that I am treading into choppy water here, but I hope that by laying out my understanding and feelings that the parts of me that are ignorant can be sanded down by conscientious readers and the effort of writing them all out.

I don’t think it is Jim’s accent that falls short of creating a voice for Jim. Jim’s accent is as thick and specific as all the other characters around him. Is it a uniform accent across all Black characters in the book? That’s hard for me to determine with so few lines coming from other Black characters. So, even though how he says passes my smell test (at least as far as any of the patois in the book pass), what he says causes some hang ups. At his worst, Jim is portrayed as gullible, naive, and superstitious. To his gullibility and naivete, I can firmly say that in a book of sharp people trying to pull one over on each other, I’m not impressed that the one always pulled over on is Jim. However, I’m not sure about Jim’s superstitions. I’m not sure if I am carrying a bias about his superstitions, or if the narrator is, or if the book is. I’m not sure that it’s appropriate for me to call his beliefs superstitions, any more than it would be appropriate for him to call mine superstitions. His beliefs certainly fall in line with Huck and Tom’s beliefs established over the course of their two books. I don’t have any hang ups about them believing in the powers of dead cats and graveyards. I’m not sure why I’m hung up on Jim believing the same.

I’m not sure, in part because, at the end of the day, I am not Black. Mark Twain is not Black. Both of us are seeking verisimilitude through observation, personal relationships, and “hearing it.” Twain created Jim as a reflection of Daniel Quarles, “Uncle Dan’l,” a slave on his uncle’s Florida farm. A slave that Twain unilaterally spoke highly of, even crediting Quarles with teaching Twain the proper craft of storytelling through the nightly ghost stories “Uncle Dan’l” told to the children on the farm. Twain, like Huckleberry Finn, loved the enslaved man beside him, and yet, I think, failed to see the entirety of the man, or understand what it meant to be an enslaved Black man talking with the little White nephew of his master. I think the novel understands this at times. But not always. Huckleberry Finn, and by extension Mark Twain’s, big revelation is that Jim, and by extension Daniel Quarles, is a person just the same as him. A monumental thing for a child raised by slaveholders to believe, whether his name was Mark or Huck. But it wasn’t until much later than Huckleberry Finn that Twain began to understand the need for reparations, and that a realization of humanity was the beginning of undoing the harm, not the end.

I’m also unsure because Toni Morrison’s Beloved gave me entirely different feelings while using much of the same patter. “Dallas, Toni Morrison is a Black woman and a Nobel Prize winner. It makes sense that her book about former slaves in Ohio might ring a little more true than Twain’s book.” I agree that that’s a given. I don’t think there are many books that can hold a candle to Beloved no matter the subject matter. But what has stuck in my teeth after Beloved is how clever and human everyone felt while being steeped in the kinds of superstitions and thick accents that make me stand on edge in Huckleberry Finn. The very things that make me feel far away from Jim, are the things that made me feel like I knew Sethe. They’re the things that made her more than words on a page. I have an accent, I have superstitions, I am a full person. That was so clear with Sethe. I can’t figure out why it isn’t true for Jim. Because it’s clear that Twain is trying to do what Morrison did. The whole point of his book is that Jim is a man. Jim is not property. Jim is not some other kind of person. Jim is a man that deserves humanity and respect. I genuinely believe that Twain loves Jim. But I’m not sure that the book does.

Percival Everett Loves Jim. It’s apparent from the first page. The same first person narration that enlivens Huckleberry Finn inhabits James. But the accent is gone. The superstitions are an act. Sitting within the head of James: the secular humanist, doesn’t feel much different from sitting in any liberal arts classroom in any worthwhile university in America. The same argument that Everett made in Erasure, that one does not have to talk or act Black in order to be Black, sits strangely on Jim’s shoulders. I can’t decide if the strangeness is in me or the book.

Again, like Twain, I understand Blackness through observation and personal relationships. ANYTHING Percival Everett says about Blackness carries astronomically more weight than anything I, or Mark Twain, say. That’s true. So where I disagree with Everett, based on observation, and personal relationships, please take it at whatever value that holds for you.

I was born and raised in Utah. I think it would be generous to say that I personally knew twenty Black people before I turned eighteen. My friend, Dayan, and in passing his father and sister, were the closest connection I had to Blackness for years. Even then, we were by no means the closest of friends. He came to a birthday party of mine, we played in the same group of fifteen boys at recess. We drifted apart in middle school but waved when we passed each other in the hall. I was fully confident that I understood what Black people were like. They were just like you and me. It was 2014 and I “didn’t see color” and neither should you. That mapped perfectly onto my experience in an affluent neighborhood in Layton, Utah.

I moved to Kansas City, Missouri in 2015.

I had never been around Black people who didn’t have to code switch. I didn’t know that there was any such thing as code switching. I was suddenly in a place, and with people as foreign to me as anything I had ever experienced, and it was beautiful. And, I’m embarrassed to say, it made me nervous. And jealous. And curious. And it made me dig out the deep rooted belief in me that there was a right way to be a person. Though I had never been taught to think anyone was less than for the color of their skin, I carried with me beliefs about how “good” people ought to act, that were exclusively informed by my very White culture. Thankfully, though the roots were deep, they came out quickly. It was hard not to let them go, because I loved everything in Kansas City. It couldn’t have been further from my Mormon upbringing, and that was the thrill. That is what drew me to it.

That is what felt missing in James’s voice, to me. I know James, he and I voted the same way in 2024. He and I have read the same books. He and I quote the same philosophers. While reading his book, James never became more than words on a page for me.

Then I reread Huckleberry Finn.

I re-met Jim, and he didn’t have his voice there either. He seemed like that caricature that Everett had warned me against. But when Jim would pause before talking to Huck, or when he would graze against a deeper topic with Huck, or toward the end of the book when he spoke more earnestly with Huck, I could see the edges of James’s voice. I saw in Huckleberry Finn an iceberg I would have otherwise missed. I realized that all of that internality of James made me understand Jim back in Huckleberry Finn. In addition, when Jim joked with Huck, or disagreed with Huck, or scolded Huck, or thanked Huck, I heard the humanity in Jim’s voice that Twain had lovingly crafted. He was a specific person from a specific place, like the boy he was speaking to, and the man who wrote him. If James gave me the hidden portion of the iceberg, Huckleberry Finn gave me the face to fix my gaze on. It took both Mark Twain and Percival Everett to give me this character. This person. The stories intertwined, and Jim and James became more than words on the page.

Treacherous waters navigated, let’s set our sights on the,

World

James is through-and-through a modern literary novel in its approach to place. By this I mean that there is almost no sense of place. It is a book that walks the winding paths of its protagonist’s mind, spending the bulk of its words on his reactions and feelings toward the events of the external plot. Now, I am a card-carrying member of the Carl-Jung-internal-world club, but I desperately need literary novels to remember that we are tangible, flesh and blood creatures that are adapted to, and live within a tangible world. It is not a mystery how this cognitive drift has occurred. Most of us spend the majority of our time in places where something alive appearing unexpectedly is an affront. Mold, cockroaches, and on exciting days, raccoons, are as close as most of us get to the world that we have so thoroughly distanced ourselves from and it is abundantly clear in our fiction. Add to that the digital focus we have within these sterile places, and what exactly is the modern novelist supposed to describe? Besides the vaguest conjurings at a place, most often just a name of a city that you can picture through a pinterest-board you made when you were fourteen, or an A24 movie set there, there’s no effort to make “the city a character” in our current literary movement.

But I can forgive James this shortcoming of modern novels, because, at the end of the day, this is a retelling of a classic novel specifically meant to place me in the mind of an overshadowed character. Everett has taken the current form--as much as I may find it vacuous--and has used it to as interesting of an end as I think possible. At least James didn’t take a year of rest and relaxation for the entirety of his novel.

And I would be lying if I said there weren’t scenes that built a strong sense of place, that place being the pre-civil war American South through Black eyes. When James separates from Huckleberry Finn Everett is called upon to conjure a place, and people, that he cannot pull from Twain. This is where he shines most brightly as a storyteller in this book. These sections are just as full of James’s internality as the rest of the novel, but they also take the time to establish culture, texture, and tangibility in a way that the rest of the story lacks. Everett ensures that you can hear the minstrel songs that James sings. You can feel the chains at the blacksmith. You feel the soft grass beneath your back when that little redneck boy is off having an adventure without you. The Black characters original to James are the strongest secondary characters in the book, Twain’s cast not withstanding. They are nuanced, they are interesting, and they navigate a world I have never been privy to in life or fiction. This is where the book felt most real to me.

Huckleberry Finn is a book with the mirror image proportions of James. While there are moments of internality within Huckleberry Finn, and those moments are what make this book as monumental as it is, the story is concerned primarily with people, places, and events. This, to me, feels like an outgrowth of Twain’s life that was filled with--you guessed it: people, places, and events. This river, these people, that culture, was familiar to Twain in a way that seems jam-packed by today’s novelistic standards. Not to sound trite, but the river is a character in this book, each town an aspect of its personality. The river is also a force of nature. You will get wet on this ride. You will get bit by bugs, fish, and snakes. You will look up at the vastness of space. With every empty second of a phoneless day, you will experience the open country of the Mississippi River. It feels like nothing else I’ve read this year, a muddy-toed manifesto.

Again, the book leaves space to describe and experience the place, devoid of Huck’s perceptions or even their effect on him as an individual. There is an understanding that Huck is a very small part of a very large river. Whether he is feeling up to the task or not, the river, and therefore the story, will continue carrying him forward. It rains hard on the river, and not just when Huck is feeling emotionally distraught. Like Tolkien’s trees, Twain’s river is something worth observing--for a moment--without interpretation. That same desire for verisimilitude in speech creates space for some of the most vivid descriptions of an early morning in the open air that I’ve ever read. Birds, bugs, lanterns, breezes, all of it is described and subsequently felt. If we want to prop up the novel as an “empathy machine” I would argue that it is books like Huckleberry Finn that can bestow upon us the necessary empathy to care enough about our world to begin re-integrating ourselves into it, and therefore helping to heal it.

Themes

While James is clearly an attempt to portray an actual world, and a proposed language of a bygone era, it is much more a treatise on depictions of Blackness in fiction. It is important to remember that this is not a story grown out of a desire to tell us about some man named James and how he moves through the world and what that ought to mean to us. No, James, is first and foremost art about art. It is Jim, a character already well known, that Everett wants to teach us about. There is a remove there. There isn’t ever an attempt to convince you that this is not about the fiction, it is, in fact, emphatically about the fiction. In the same way the novel is deeply internal, concerned with intangible desires and hurts inside of James, it is concerned with what is going on in your head. It is art meant to correct perceptions and understandings built out of other art. This phenomenon feels deeply modern to me. In a society where our sense of self is so intertwined with our consumption, how and what we consume is as real of a concern as how or what we live. The rallying cry that “All Art IS Political,” while rooted in reality, tends to lead the rallied to believe that the job is all done once the inherently political art is or is not consumed. The politics of the art don’t bleed into the real world; it stays in the purity of the immaterial, consumptive world. James as metafiction is aimed at scrubbing spots off the rug inside the collective consciousness.

Huckleberry Finn was about calling for and making atonement for wrongs in the tangible world. It did not do this perfectly, but it did so earnestly. This is not, however, why I love Huckleberry Finn. I love Huckleberry Finn because it is about a boy who chooses to go against what he had been taught was the right thing to do. I need art like that. Because I am a boy that had to choose to go against what I had been taught. If you’ll excuse a digression about another book to clarify my point:

Saga is a comic book series from the immensely talented Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples (et. al). It may very well be my favorite comic book of all time. For context’s sake, it is a space opera about Romeo-and-Julliet-Style lovers from opposite sides of a contrived forever war (we don’t know anything about those.) While the romance and relationships within the book are compelling, the adventures exciting, and the characters engrossing, Saga means the most to me as the means by which I was first exposed to many of the political problems and beliefs of the adult world.

As I have reiterated ad nauseum, I came from a conservative place. I took at face value the beliefs and values of my parents and peers. I knew George Bush was a moron, but not for any substantive reason, just because he talked with a drawal. I knew my uncle hated Obama, but my parent’s ambivalence toward that subject usually made my uncle seem a bit crazy. I internally knew that men were more important than women, though no one ever came out and said it. I knew that Gay people were sinners, and Lesbians were the gateway category on Pornhub. Accepting homosexuality, let alone being kind towards someone who “had it” was as sure a way to hell as anything I knew. The God of “infinite love and kindness” was depending on me to be cruel. I didn’t question these things. I was indifferent toward every issue other than homophobia, of which (sadly) I was a proud participant. But what’s important to my point, is that these things didn’t feel like a choice, or even an obligation. They were just “normal” beliefs. Everyone around me agreed with these values in the kind of quiet way that entrenches them.

Then I read Saga.

Brian K Vaughan did not agree with me on any of these inherited beliefs. Fiona Staples did not depict the relationships, bodies, and situations to which I was accustomed. In fact, she regularly--and potently--showed me things I’d been told were off putting, or wrong. Things pushed so far into the marginalia that I wouldn’t have come across them at all, were it not for her work. Well before Fox News taught my grandparents, Fiona Staples and Brian K Vaughan introduced me to a Trans woman. Her name is Petrichor. They didn’t nail her intro. But they made her human, in a way that made her one of my favorite characters. I saw that she was not scary. I saw that people who made her feel wrong for who she was were the bad guys. I saw that she had a right to a happy and fulfilled life, and even a happy and fulfilled sex life. As silly as it may sound, that was my seed. That was the seed that allowed me to deconstruct everything I didn’t believe from my upbringing, and reinforce and redirect everything I wanted to hold onto. Meeting Petrichor, even though she wasn’t introduced or handled perfectly, changed my life in the tangible world.

My best friend wouldn’t be a Trans Woman if I’d never met Petrichor.

I wouldn’t be thrilled to hear that my closest friend from my LDS mission was marrying his boyfriend if I’d never met Petrichor.

I wouldn’t have cried reading Huckleberry Finn if I hadn’t met Petrichor.

You see, this is the first time I’ve read Huckleberry Finn since walking away from the God and religion of my youth to embrace people that I’d been taught to hate.

I hope it’s clear why this passage struck me:

(Huck has just made up his mind to do what he has been taught to believe is the morally upright and even righteous thing. He has written a letter to turn Jim back over to slavery in Missouri.)

“I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn't do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking- thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me, all the time; in the day, and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a floating along, talking, and singing, and laughing. But somehow I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I'd see him standing my watch on top of his'n, stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him agin in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me, and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had smallpox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he's got now; and then I happened to look around, and see that paper.

“It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:"All right, then, I'll go to hell"- and tore it up.”

Twain wrote that Huckleberry Finn was, “a book of mine where a sound heart & a deformed conscience came into collision & conscience suffers defeat.” Conscience, to Twain, was a product of your upbringing. He, as the child of slave owners in Missouri, was taught that slavery was a divine institution, and an essential aspect of the kingdom of God. I, as a Mormon, was taught that homophobia was a divine institution, and an essential aspect of the kingdom of God. Luckily, for the two of us, a sound heart led the way out.

To be clear, I think that both approaches to representing social issues in these books have their place. There wasn’t a transphobic character in Saga that made me see the error of my ways. There was just an earnest depiction of a life other than my own, like what Everett accomplished in James. However, Huckleberry Finn changing his core values to align better with what he knew to be right, makes me feel what James Baldwin described: “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”

I now live in a place where most folks agree with my new worldview. They’ve always agreed with this worldview. Their parents agree with this worldview. Oftentimes, even their grandparents agreed with this worldview. They have a hard time understanding how I could have ever believed any other way. There are times that I feel immense shame for believing the only things I was taught. Enough shame that sometimes I want to throw out all the parts of my upbringing that I still love. It is important to me that Huckleberry Finn could decide to go to hell and still love the Mississippi River. That he could still love Tom Sawyer even though Tom’s heart hadn’t beat Tom’s conscience--in fact there wasn’t much of a battle there to begin with. I love Huckleberry Finn for choosing to be something other than what he was raised to be, and I do not hate him for having been raised that way. I do not hate the individuals who raised him, even as I hate that he was raised that way. I am just proud of him for starting something new. That is my pain and my heartbreak that I thought was unique.

And now,

A Contrived Ending

Both of these books have bizarre endings. They spend the first 75% of their page count as literary fiction, then both inexplicably become genre pieces for the remaining 25%. I can’t say that I’ve ever seen anything else like it, and I’m left believing that Everett must have done it as a direct homage to the strange choice by Twain.

What makes the decision stranger, is how tightly wound up each novel is before the digression. Ernest Hemingway went so far as to say:

“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. If you read it you must stop where the Ni***r Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating. But it’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”

I tend to agree with Hemingway on this subject. Up to Huck’s “I’ll go to Hell,” the book is singular, after that it becomes a strange digression into the sequel of Tom Sawyer it never really was. Heart felt admissions and ugly truths give way to slapstick routines and easily the most flattened characterization of Jim in the entire book. The same Jim that scolded Huck for teasing him a hundred pages prior blandly accepts the antics of two small boys making light of his imprisonment at the hand of slavers. There’s no word for this ending other than baffling, though perhaps Hemingway’s cheating works. Cheating because this is Twain taking the air out of his own argument. Perhaps frightened at how far he has extended his true views on the subject, he returns to the romanticized version of The South present in Tom Sawyer.

James does not become slapstick. James, becomes a Tarantino movie.

-- If you have not read James, I am going to spoil the twist/reveal at the end of the story. --

If Huckleberry Finn aims its story at Huck’s decision to abandon his conscience, James aims its story at the revelation that James is Huckleberry Finn’s father. Take this worth a grain of salt, but I do not like that reveal at all. Much of the point of the original story falls apart if the entire thing has been about concealed familial relations. I understand that this reinforces the central theme of James, that race and identity are not things cleanly recognized or categorized. Throughout the novel we interact with different characters experiencing the world differently due to their degrees of Blackness, with one of the most memorable sections detailing Jim donning Whiteface to then plaster on Blackface to participate in a minstrel show. The revelation, therefore, that Huck is also a passing Black boy, is perfectly in line with the thrust of the book. In the same way that “I’ll go to hell” perfectly caps Huckleberry Finn, “Huckleberry Finn. I. AM. YOUR FATHER,” is the proper ending of James.

Then the book keeps going. Huck and Jim part ways. Jim returns to St. Petersburg to Django Unchained Judge Thatcher and free his family. Don’t misunderstand me, this is very cool. I like this much more than Huckleberry Finn’s slapstick routine. It’s some of the most gripping writing in the novel, and absolutely constitutes one of the “original scenes” I’ve been praising throughout this piece. But it’s just as out of left field as Twain’s unfortunate digression. Both of these novels genuinely feel like complete stories with a genre short story stapled to the end. It’s like the literary equivalent of when Maroon 5 would have a rap verse in the middle of a song, it’s not that you don’t like it (though sometimes you don’t) it’s just a really odd thing to do.

-- Once again safe for the spoiler-sensitive (you babies missed one of my favorite jokes) --

There it is folks, the perfect article about Huckleberry Finn and James, not marred by personal interpretation or anecdote. Just good old fashioned objective literary criticism. I’m an inspiration.

If you liked it, please:

And: